Throughout the chaos of the first year of President Trump’s second term, Democrats have routinely condemned him as corrupt and unfit to serve.
But with the exception of a few lawmakers at the left fringe of the party whose tactics were greeted with eye-rolls by colleagues and Democratic leaders, they have steered clear of threatening impeachment or suggesting the invocation of the 25th Amendment to enable his cabinet and vice president to remove him from office.
Over the past week, that dynamic has shifted dramatically. Mr. Trump’s online threats against Iran, culminating in his shocking warning that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” if the country did not cave to his demands, have opened the floodgates of Democratic calls for the president’s removal.
Formerly hesitant House Democrats are now lining up to file or support articles of impeachment against the president and his top cabinet officials, motivated by what they view as Mr. Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior, and a clamor from their constituents to confront him more aggressively. More than 70 Democratic lawmakers have called for either impeachment or the invocation of the 25th amendment.
“Increasingly, voters are demanding impeachment because they’re frustrated,” Representative John Larson, a Connecticut Democrat who on Monday filed 13 impeachment articles against Mr. Trump, said in an interview. He said his office had received more than 400 calls from constituents praising his action, describing their message as: “It’s long overdue, and why haven’t you guys done that before?”
The abrupt change could carry consequences for the midterm elections, potentially distracting from their efforts to focus relentlessly on affordability and to blame Republicans for the economic hardships that many voters are feeling.
Recognizing that risk, Democrats for months had shied away from impeachment talk. Scarred by their experience with two past impeachments that fell flat and emboldened Mr. Trump, they have been hesitant to participate in a replay, particularly when Republicans are in control of both chambers of Congress and any impeachment effort would be all but certain to fail.
Republicans who are facing an uphill fight to keep their majority are enthusiastically highlighting Democrats’ impeachment talk in an effort to present them as radical and unhinged. Speaker Mike Johnson said the calls were driven by “irrational hatred” of Mr. Trump.
“The midterm election will be a contrast between common sense and crazy, and the Democrats are demonstrating once again their deranged priorities,” he said in a statement on Friday.
Mr. Larson, who is facing a competitive primary as he seeks his 15th term, said he had been drafting his impeachment articles weeks before Mr. Trump’s shocking statement about Iran, in part in response to what he has heard from constituents back home. But the president’s threats to wipe out an entire civilization, which Mr. Larson said “foreshadow war crimes,” were “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
Representative Yassamin Ansari, Democrat of Arizona and the daughter of Iranian immigrants, announced plans to file articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and said Mr. Trump, too, must be removed.
Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee who served as the lead impeachment manager in Mr. Trump’s second impeachment trial, on Friday afternoon was scheduled to give a briefing to his colleagues on how the House could tackle another presidential impeachment and how to use the 25th Amendment to potentially remove Mr. Trump from office.
In a letter to the White House physician, he hinted at what the grounds would be, demanding a “comprehensive cognitive assessment” of Mr. Trump, and that the results be presented to Congress.
“President Trump’s recent behavior has raised unsettling questions about his mental state,” Mr. Raskin wrote, citing his recent volatile social media posts about the war in Iran. “We have indisputably entered the realm of profound medical difficulty and concern.”
Senator Andy Kim, Democrat of New Jersey, said in a video posted on social media that “of course” Mr. Trump should be impeached.
In the past, however, the “of course” has not been so clear-cut for Democrats.
Historically, impeachment has been politically unpopular with voters in both parties, who have viewed it more as a partisan weapon than a serious constitutional check on a lawbreaking president. Voters generally prefer for any dissatisfaction with a president or an administration to be expressed at the ballot box.
In recent years, both Republican and Democratic leaders have strained to hold back partisan efforts from members of their caucuses to impeach both Mr. Trump and former President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.
Last June, for instance, Democrats voted en masse to table a resolution from Representative Al Green, Democrat of Texas, to impeach the president for abuse of power after he launched military strikes on Iran without congressional authorization. And Representative Shri Thanedar, Democrat of Michigan, has developed a reputation on Capitol Hill as something of a caucus clown for his regular introductions of impeachment resolutions against the president and his cabinet officials.
But, Democrats have said in recent days that desperate times call for desperate measures.
Some said their phone lines were being flooded with calls to do something — anything — to try to stop Mr. Trump from pursuing his deeply unpopular war in Iran.
Ms. Ansari said she was encouraged to move ahead with articles of impeachment in part by a poll commissioned by a progressive organization that found that a majority of registered voters supported impeaching Mr. Trump.
Mr. Larson is well aware that the previous failed efforts to impeach Mr. Trump left barely a scrape on him. He is under no illusions that the Republican-led House will impeach Mr. Trump this time around, or that the Senate would vote to convict him.
But he said he was heeding advice he received from Ralph Nader, the political activist and former presidential candidate, who told him that a lawmaker would be “derelict” in their duties if they did not give voters some action to show them that they were being heard.
He said he had alerted Democratic leaders that he intended to file impeachment articles, but received no response.
“I don’t want to get out ahead of that discussion,” Mr. Jeffries said on Thursday, when asked about the renewed impeachment efforts. He emphasized that the central message ahead of the midterm elections was that “House Democrats are going to focus on making life more affordable for the American people.”
But Mr. Jeffries has backed the tactic in the past, in one situation where he thought he could garner Republican support to move an impeachment effort forward. He said earlier this year that Democrats would begin impeachment proceedings against Kristi Noem, the former homeland security secretary, if she was not fired, after the killing of civilians by ICE agents on the streets of Minneapolis. (Ms. Noem was fired last month.)
Democrats said they are also newly emboldened by the fact that some who had been Mr. Trump’s most fervid allies, including Tucker Carlson and former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, have been raising alarms over the president’s fitness to serve as commander in chief.
Ms. Greene in recent days has called for Mr. Trump to be removed via the 25th Amendment. Mr. Carlson, on his podcast, admonished anyone currently working in the administration: “Now it’s time to say, ‘No, absolutely not,’ and say it directly to the president: ‘No.’ ”
Ms. Ansari noted that the dissent from former allies underscores “the severity of how clearly mentally unstable he is. His rhetoric about Iran was so beyond the pale; nobody can with a straight face say that he is not a danger to our country.”
She added: “Everything that’s happening is so insane and people are sick and tired of it and don’t understand how we’re going to function as a country for another couple of years.”
Ms. Ansari plans to file what she described as “extensive” impeachment articles against Mr. Hegseth next week, her primary reason being that she believes he committed a war crime in the Tomahawk missile strike on an Iranian girls’ elementary school that killed at least 175 people, most of them children.
Geoff Garin, the Democratic pollster, said that public opinion of impeachment has shifted, with a majority of Democratic voters viewing Mr. Trump’s recent conduct as “both dangerous and demented.”
“Calls for Trump’s impeachment or removing him from office via the 25th Amendment obviously speak to that demand,” he said. “But at the end of the day, what most Democrats really want and see as the most effective option right now is to defeat Trump in the November elections.”
Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent for The Times.
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